Pfeiffer: Don't shrug off impeachment

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer warned Friday that the possibility of an impeachment of the president shouldn’t be discarded.

“I would not discount the possibility,” he said at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington. “Speaker Boehner, by going down the path of this lawsuit, opened the door to Republicans pursuing impeachment at some point in the future.”

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Pfeiffer’s remarks on impeachment — which were initially unprompted — referenced former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s call to impeach Barack Obama in a controversial Breitbart News column on July 8, in which she likened Americans to a “battered wife” and called Obama “lawless.” While many in Washington laughed Palin off, he said, impeachment was not something to be taken lightly.

Boehner himself, however, declined to take up the impeachment call, as have other House Republicans.

Still, Pfeiffer said the possibility remains open.

“It would be foolish to discount the possibility that Republicans would think about going down that path,” he said.

Pfeiffer had spoken of a possible impeachment before but never as candidly as he did Friday. On July 16, he told POLITICO, “Impeachment is obviously a very serious topic being bandied about in an unserious way by unserious people.”

When asked whether impeachment would be politically gainful for the president, Pfeiffer said it would not be beneficial at all.

A CNN/OCR poll of 1,012 adult Americans showed that 65 percent did not believe that Obama should be impeached and removed from office, while 33 percent indicated that he should. In addition, 41 percent agreed that House Republicans should file the lawsuit and 57 percent thought that they shouldn’t.

The poll was conducted by telephone from July 18-20 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.